Theme : The Stylistic power of the Noun

1.2. Grammatical categories of nouns
Grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language. The words of everyday language are divided up into several word classes, or parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. It often happens that the words in a given class exhibit two or more forms used in somewhat different grammatical circumstances. In each such case, this variation in form is required by the presence in the language of one or more grammatical categories applying to that class of words. English nouns are affected by only one grammatical category, that of number: we have singular dog but plural dogs, and so on for most (but not all) of the nouns in the language. These forms are not interchangeable, and each must be used always and only in specified grammatical circumstances. And here is a key point: we must always use a noun in either its singular form or its plural form, even when the choice seems irrelevant; there is no possibility of avoiding the choice, and there is no third form which is not marked one way or the other. This is typically the case with grammatical categories[4;62].
The grammatical category of number is the linguistic representation of the objective category of quantity. The number category is realized through the opposition of two form-classes: the plural form: the singular form. The category of number in English is restricted in its realization because of the dependent implicit grammatical meaning of countableness/uncountableness. The number category is realized only within subclass of countable nouns.The grammatical meaning of number may not coincide with the notional quantity: thenoun in the singular does not necessarily denote one object while the plural form may be used to denote one object consisting of several parts . Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective category of possession. The case category in English is realized through the opposition: The Common Case: The Possessive Case (sister:: sister’s). However, in modern linguistics the term “genitive case” is used instead of the “possessive case” because the meanings rendered by the “`s” sign are not only those of possession. The scope of meanings rendered by the Genitive Case is the following:
Possessive Genitive: Mary’s father – Mary has a father,
Subjective Genitive: The doctor’s arrival – The doctor has arrived,
Objective Genitive: The man’s release – The man was released,
Adverbial Genitive: Two hour’s work – X worked for two hours,
Equation Genitive: a mile’s distance – the distance is a mile,
Genitive of destination: children’s books – books for children,
Mixed Group: yesterday’s paper
Nick’s school cannot be reduced to one nucleus
John’s word.
To avoid confusion with the plural, the marker of the genitive case is represented in written form with an apostrophe. This fact makes possible disengagement of –`s form from the noun to which it properly belongs. E.g.: The man I saw yesterday’s son, where -`s is appended to the whole group (the so-called group genitive). It may even follow a word which normally does not possess such a formant, as in somebody else’s book [4;65].
There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English. Different scholars stick to a different number of cases.
1. There are two cases. The Common one and The Genitive;
2. There are no cases at all, the form`s is optional because the same relations may be expressed by the ‘of-phrase’: the doctor’s arrival – the arrival of the doctor;
There are three cases: the Nominative, the Genitive, the Objective due to the existence of objective pronouns me, him, whom;
Ch.Fillmore introduced syntactic-semantic classification of cases. They show relations in the so-called deep structure of the sentence. According to him, verbs Gender plays a relatively minor part in the grammar of English by comparison with its role in many other languages. There is no gender concord, and the reference of the pronouns he, she, it is very largely determined by what is sometimes referred to as ‘natural’ gender for English, it depends upon the classification of persons and objects as male, female or inanimate. Thus, the recognition of gender as a grammatical category is logically independent of any particular semantic association [5;74].
The difference between such nouns as actor and actress is a purely lexical one. In other words, the category of gender should not be confused with the category of sex, because sex is an objective biological category. It correlates with gender only when sex differences of living beings are manifested in the language grammatically (e.g. tiger – tigress) .Still, other scholars (M.Blokh, John Lyons) admit the existence of the category of gender. Prof. Blokh states that the existence of the category of gender in Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns of the third person (he, she, it). Accordingly, there are three genders in English: the neuter (non-person) gender, the masculine gender, the feminine gender[5;90].
So, nouns is very important because its structure is used in every day conversation. The more you practice the subject, the closer you get to mastering the English language. But first we need to know what the role of nouns is in the structure of the grammar in English and also know their grammatical categories.